Le Baron wrote:I don't use an e-reader extensively, so I wonder what people think about the ease of looking up words with built-in dictionaries. I tend to feel that it makes things too easy at times. The necessity of building tolerance to skip over a few unknown things for the sake of reading momentum seems to me better than looking up every word and also forces you to work things out.
I have a love-hate relationship with e-readers. On the one hand their cheap design and form factor leave much to be desired (you either have small e-readers the size of women's purse or huge ones for reading PDFs). On the other hand, since I learn languages to read sophisticated and challenging books in the original, they are a real blessing.
I don't see using pop-up dictionary as making things easy or cheating. I read books for myself, and when it comes to high quality writing, I want to savor every single word. What's the point of reading a classical work in the original, if you can only 'get the gist'? You'd be far better off with the translation, even a bad one. But now, thanks to the Kindle app on my iPad, I can read—and enjoy!—the works which would be still out of reach for me, since checking more that 10 words per page is a real chore.
That said, I continue to read paper books. In that case I rarely check words, for I'm too lazy. But you need to have at least 99% known words for that, if your aim is to enjoy the prose, not just 'getting the gist'.
So, now it's almost a natural division for me: intensive reading on iPad, and paper books for extensive reading.
According to my lists, I read about 23 books per year on average between 2018 and 2020 – although 2020 was far from a „normal“ year 
